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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gorgoroth" data-source="post: 5894050" data-attributes="member: 6674889">trackingTracking is the ONE thing rangers should excel at. No matter where you are. You're in the wilderness on a rocky path. You're tailing an assassin in the streets of city X. Tracking should just work : period. Nobody would think Sherlock Holmes' powers of perception or deduction would only work in the streets of london, but not in the backyard of the Baskervilles' estates.A ranger's perception skills should be almost inhumanly acute. This should allow the ranger to also notice that, say, there is a slight limp in the right leg of that ogre, and targetting that might make his tendon snap. The class is all about DIY, taking care of business, survival, self-reliance, hunting, sneaking, preying, climbing, and killing game, both large and small. I LOVE the idea of picking up extra bonuses AFTER you encounter your first X monster, up to the point of : rangers may get bonus XP for fighting new creatures all the time, or learning to dominate them in battle. A bear hunter would learn to set the food with an herbal poison then stab it with a long spear and run away repeatedly due to it having blurry vision. Kiting should be an option. Go for the legs, keep it at bay, finish it off in melee. Avoid enemy hits. When poisoned, investigate what its natural prey would be in that environment and find an antidote in the blood that their may possibly have evolved.Notice that there are no large enemies, but sink holes. Maybe magic is barren in this area, how did dragons adapt to living here? By becoming more melee combat focused. Who knows. I'm just throwing ideas out there.I also like, for two-weapon fighting buffs (I am one, sometimes, but personally prefer the Aragorn switch-hitter archetype), the way that everquest did it. Warriors get dual wielding at slightly higher level than rangers. Say a ranger starts off with the ability to fight with a longsword and a handaxe in his offhand. By the time he's got 6 levels (no more), we can dual wield longswords if he wishes. Or if he prefers a bastard sword, can attack twice with it but lose some type of str bonus to the second hit. I'd prefer to gain multi-attacking with the same weapon, slightly earlier than a fighter, who's also slowed down in armor and less offensively minded and focused on the quick kill. Rangers are epitomized by the "quick kill", to my mind. It's risky, because if you let the enemy retaliate you will suffer. This implies a different type of balance of AC. Which is why I sincerely hope armor as DR will work, so you can have one guy who prefers to avoid blows entirely, and the other guy can shrug them off in his plate armor. A ranger may even wear a breastplate, but no more, if he wishes to use his fighting talents. Perhaps at tenth level he could be good enough at dual wielding or his two-handed bonus to do it, to work it in heavier armor. But in this game, there should be a mechanically important tradeoff between heavy and light armor to make building an effective ranger imply that it would be stupid to ever wear heavier armor. Like, you need Dex for 1/2 your attacks or your attack bonuses. I like the idea of getting Dex bonus to damage, on top of strength, for example. Bam, heavy armor problem solved. So many ways to push players building rangers in that direction and minimize multiclassing with no synergy. There should be juicy things available at a low enough level to make the class really appealing (say 5th or 6th) to continue in, but not too low to make it front-loaded. And scaling bonuses is good too. I REALLY like whoever's idea it was to load up on favored enemies as if in a spellbook. You'd still need to have killed it, after finding its weakness through engaging it and observing it (hopefully beforehand). Actually nix that, you should be able to gain a bonus against a brand new enemy you've never fought before, through stalking it for a while and watching how it fights / kills its other opponents. Or maybe just sneaking around its lair and observing its kills for patterns. This would count as "tranferring it into your little black book of death", aka learning a new spell.wicked new rule idea, kudos to this forum. Makes exploration and actually using your skills, fun!</blockquote>

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